Joe Scarborough: GOP isn’t learning from its mistakes

My children and I love watching Peter Pan. In fact, we’ve seen the Disney classic so often through the years that we could probably recite most of the movie from memory. Maybe that’s why the opening lines came so easily to my mind earlier this week while watching a far less joyful tale unfold on Capitol Hill.

“This has all happened before and it will happen again” are the first words to that sweet movie about eternal youth. Unfortunately, those lines also fit a bit too snugly on the carcass of a political movement that seems incapable of learning from past mistakes. Chances are good that Republicans will continue getting blindsided by political events until Republican leaders stop cowering to public figures who insist on filtering out all realities that are in conflict with their preexisting worldviews.

If this sounds all too familiar, it’s because Republicans were licking their wounds around this time last year after being blindsided by a presidential election whose outcome they should have seen coming a mile away. But ignorance was bliss as conservative politicians and talkers pushed bogus polls and political fairy tales to angry voters who were once again on the losing side of history. Media outlets that released polls showing President Obama winning were attacked as biased and conservatives who warned of Romney’s weaknesses were rhetorically burned at the stake as heretics.

Barack Obama won again and Republican leaders swore that next time would be different.

Well, next time came one year later, and one year later, way too many conservatives once again found themselves shocked by the obvious. The Shutdown Strategy was doomed from the start even though conservatives like myself, Scott Walker, Tom Coburn and Charles Krauthammer agreed with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page’s early assessment that Ted Cruz’s approach would lead to political disaster. It did, and yet I understand why Cruz and his allies ignored smart conservative advice. It wasn’t so long ago that congressmen like Steve Largent, Matt Salmon, Tom Coburn and myself saw similar political warnings from senior Republicans as a sign of timidity and weakness. And then Bill Clinton cleaned our clocks, got reelected, and put the 1994 Revolution on its heels for good. Two decades later, conservatives wandered into that ambush again.

The costs have been pretty big to the GOP. This shutdown drove the Republican brand into the ground, with only 24 percent of Americans approving of the party’s performance. That may not hurt conservative senators from Alabama or Texas, but it is a nightmare for Republicans representing states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. More troubling is just how divided this episode left us. I’m not sure how it happened but the Grand Old Party is now divided in two camps over something as grubby as legislative tactics.

That is the crazy thing about the GOP’s latest battle. As Jonah Goldberg noted in National Review, this is not an epic ideological battle between Rockefeller Republicans and Goldwater conservatives. It is instead a legislative skirmish between Republicans who oppose Obamacare and wanted to use a two-month continuing resolution as a legislative device to undermine the law, and on the other side those who oppose Obamacare but did not think that tactic would work.

This was a big, fat nothing-burger turned into a gladiatorial grudge match by a blizzard of 30-second ads and tactical ignorance. As the smoke clears, we now see a Republican Party holding on to its lowest ever ratings in both the Gallup and the NBC News/WSJ polls. There is enough blame to go around but the bottom line is this: Republicans will not win the White House back again until they unite behind a candidate who wins the vote of Ted Cruz and Colin Powell. The GOP used to manage that feat and that’s why nominees like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won 49 states against a hapless Democratic Party. Unless a unified Republican Party comes together, the conservative movement will keep getting blindsided by history, and what has happened before will come back to haunt us all once again.

A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again.”